June 5 - July 26, 2025
Springs Projects, New York
Jacq Groves, Diana Sofia Lozano, Saar Shemesh, Erin Johnson, Sarah Davidson, Laur P, Jay Pahre, mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao and Lou Lou Sainsbury)
With a performance by Saar Shemesh in collaboration with sound artist and musician Mars Dietz.
Curated by Sarah Davidson and Nirvana Santos-Kuilan
Sympathetic Lightning features work by 9 artists who variously expand understandings of ‘nature’ through themes of haunting, dislocation, and non-linear time. The term ‘sympathetic lightning’ refers to the tendency of lightning to be closely coordinated across long distances, appearing in clusters when viewed from space. Underlining solidarities both within the works and between the artists themselves, this exhibition highlights queer and trans perspectives in a political moment where mobility is especially fraught. Brought together by artist Sarah Davidson and curator Nirvana Santos-Kuilan, the exhibition includes the work of New York based artists Jacq Groves, Diana Sofia Lozano, Saar Shemesh, Erin Johnson, and Sarah Davidson, alongside international peers Laur P (Montréal, Canada), Jay Pahre (Vancouver, Canada), and mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao and Lou Lou Sainsbury, both Rotterdam, NL).
Set against a misty mountainscape, mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao and Lou Lou Sainsbury)’s eco-horror Resurrect Me as a Parasite plays on the nature of the vampire as a parasitic force. Interspliced images of Sint Pietersberg quarry in the Netherlands, and the Magdalene cave of Sainte-Baume Mountain in southern France–said to have been the site of Mary Magdalene’s exile and isolation–loom over the experimental narrative, conjuring cyclical ideas of life, death, gender and parasitism.
Jacq Groves’ series Embodied Infrastructures echoes ideas of cyclical entanglement, tracking time through movement as nature and object consume one another. Groves’ vignettes of trees molding themselves around architectural elements highlight the continuous nature of materials and the permeability of bodily boundaries.
Sarah Davidson’s layered compositions of plant and animal fragments also uncannily mesh worlds, troubling bodily boundaries through a mix of biomorphic abstraction and scientific illustration. The title of their painting, Crypsis–another word for camouflage–implies both the double edged sword of visibility and the queer potential of code-switching.
Saar Shemesh’s visceral sculptures THE LOST SALT and SATURN IN THE FOURTH HOUSE reference natural elements such as membranes and mucus, and integrate bodily substances like ‘communal piss’, to create wholly new forms. Oozing, dripping elements evoke monstrosity, otherness, and the abject body.
Boundaries are shown to be ever-shifting in Diana Sofia Lozano’s sprawling botanical hybrids. Embedding militarized maps in her work, the artist deconstructs boundaries of colonial identification, highlighting the fraught relationship of botany to geopolitical borders.
In Erin Johnson’s To be Sound is to Be Solid, tracking camera movement suggests a ghostly presence surveying the empty rooms of a seaside house. Voiceover of conversation with an oceanographer attempting to map the ever-shifting ocean floor parallels the filmmaker’s attempt to excavate the house’s uncharted queer history.
Jay Pahre’s ongoing Space Blanket is an intimate tracking of time and ritual, as daily testosterone gel packets are stitched together to form a space blanket, an object used for warmth and protection in the wilderness. The abstracted blanket infers the presence of the artist’s body while itself becoming a source of camouflage, reflecting its environment.
The reflective surface of Laur P’s Will our record misrecognize us too? echoes this strategy. Drawing parallels between fossilization and the act of painting, the artist highlights the trans-poetic potential of kinship across geologic time. In their writing about this work they ask “is it funny to imagine us fossilized, but safe?”
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ERIN JOHNSON is a visual artist and filmmaker based in New York. Her immersive installations and short films explore notions of collectivity, dissent, and queer identity. In her shape-shifting videos, constellations of artists, biologists, and film extras address the imbrication of science and nationalism. Johnson was recently a current Working Artist Fellow at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY) and a Winter Resident at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY).
Johnson received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley in 2013, attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019, and has recently completed residencies at Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), Lower Manhattan Community Council (LMCC), Hidrante (San Juan, PR), and Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY). Her work has been exhibited or screened at e-flux (Brooklyn), Rencontres Internationales de Paris/Berlin, BIENALSUR 2023 (Buenos Aires), MOCA Toronto (Toronto), Munchmuseet (Oslo), Sanatorium (Istanbul), Times Square Arts (New York), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Boston), Billytown (The Hague), and REDCAT (LA). https://www.erinjohnson.online/
GABI DAO (they/them) is an artist based in Maastricht, The Netherlands and is from the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver, Canada).
Dao’s practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations with an insistence on multiple truths, blurry temporalities, sensory affirmations and ways of knowing otherwise. They work through long-gestating, fluid processes of gathering, breaking and repairing from their own world-making vernacular of audio/visual fragments, tactile collections of whatnots and scraps of linguistic detritus. Thinking with these materials, their work often begins within the slippages of ‘history’, archives and storytelling—towards channeling the ineffable tensions between grief and joy, alienation and belonging, dissidence and complicity, disassociation and sentimentality. From this juncture, Dao attempts to reclaim and re-enchant meaning-making from the ruins of capitalism and colonialism, especially in the ways they have extracted from racialized, gendered and more-than-human communities. In 2024, they started the collaborative project mosquito girlfriend with artist and filmmaker Lou Lou Sainsbury.
They have screened and exhibited their work at E-flux Screening Room (Brooklyn, USA), Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin (Lethbridge, CA), A Tale-of-a-Tub (Rotterdam, NL), The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA) and Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art (Hà Nội, VN). They were recently in residence at Triangle Astérides (Marseille, FR) and the EKWC (Oisterwijk, NL). They are currently in residence at Jan van Eyck Academy. https://www.gabidao.com/
LOU LOU SAINSBURY (b. 1994; London) is an artist based in Rotterdam & London, working across moving image, live-performance, poetry, drawing, sculpture and textiles. Sainsbury’s work seeks to tell stories exploring histories of resistance, transformation and entanglement. With collaboration at the core of her practice, rituals and invocations, collective study, domestic intervention, adaptation, songwriting and make-shift mutations make up some of her idiosyncratic research methods. Making connections between spirituality, medicalisation, colonialism and technology, her tricksterish work attempts to excavate a historical and imagined past of transfeminized and queer life within the brokenness of human and more-than-human worlds. In 2024, she started the collaborative project mosquito girlfriend with artist and filmmaker Gabi Dao.
Her recent solo exhibitions include Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles (2024); Roodkapje, Rotterdam (2023); Gasworks, London & Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2022); and Well Projects, Margate (2020). She has presented in group exhibitions and festivals internationally including Rencontres Internationales (Paris & Berlin), Tate Modern (London), Chapter (Cardiff), Alchemy Film Festival (Hawick), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Nottingham Contemporary, La Casa Encendida and Yaby (Madrid). Sainsbury has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Mondriaan Fonds (both 2023 & 2025) and Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme (2021-2023). https://loulousainsbury.com/
DIANA SOFIA LOZANO (b. 1992, Cali, Colombia), is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work uses the language of botanical hybrids; the naturally occurring, genetically modified, and the imagined. Lozano presents biomimicry as metaphors for identity construction at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the politics of difference. She is interested in the deconstruction of botanical taxonomic failures in order to reveal and redefine the boundaries of colonial identificatory practices and geopolitical borders. Lozano has exhibited at Company Gallery, Deli Gallery, Proxyco Gallery, Rachel Uffner Gallery, and and Wave Hill Gardens in NYC; Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco; New Image Art in Los Angeles; Casa Prado in Barranquilla, Colombia; Örebro Konsthall in Örebro, Sweden; Parallel in Oaxaca, Mexico; Arto Kyoto in Kyoto, Japan; and Capsule Gallery in Shanghai, China, among others. Lozano holds an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. https://www.dianaslozano.com/
LAUR P's pictorial and sculptural work offers a speculative visibility of paleo-ecological compositions in becoming, an imaginary space that they investigate from a queer-crip perspective. In their works, fragments of inter-species compositions compress through a slow process of accretion, decomposition and re-emergence. Throughout this stratigraphic process they seek fossilization and indetermination while paying particular attention to the agential force of the materials they use. This intuitive and taphonomic approach allows them to visualize entanglements that are at once underworldly and topographical, micro- and macroscopic, and in which various temporal and metaphorical dimensions intersect.
On the periphery of eco-critical considerations of contemporary nature-cultures and the hauntings they reveal, Laur P’s assemblages of pictorial fossils invite a rapprochement between the formal contemplation of materials that are associated in their work and their intertwined intentions, which are, to disrupt speciesist understandings of evolution and natural phenomena, to disturb the tradition of the landscape as a space for humanistic representation of nature, to disorient ableist pictorial conventions, and therefore to resist anthropocentric myopia.
Laur P is a trans non-binary neuroqueer based in Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang-Montréal. They hold an MFA from the University of Guelph (2021) and a BFA from Concordia University with Great Distinction (2015). Throughout their academic background, they received several awards including the Joseph-Armand-Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC, University of Guelph) and the Betty Goodwin Prize in Studio Arts (Concordia University), and their current program of work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Their most recent solo exhibitions include A Scape Unnamed (Galerie Nicolas Robert, 2021), More-than-ghosts (Virtual thesis exhibition, 2021) and It Once Was a Garden (Galerie McClure, 2018). Laur P's work is part of the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Hydro-Québec, Royal Bank of Canada and Scotiabank, among others. https://www.laur-p.com/
JACQ GROVES is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator based in Queens, New York. Their project-based practice explores relationships between urban and natural ecological structures and complex bodily systems. They were the 2024 recipient of a Queens Arts Fund grant awarded by NYFA to develop a new project Embodied Infrastructure. Supporting this new work, Jacq will be an artist-in-resident at Loghaven Artist Residency and Stove Works’ Artist Residency. Previously, they exhibited a solo, site-specific show for Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project Space in the Bronx. Their work has been included in NYC-based exhibitions at Essex Flowers, The Jewish Museum, The Wallach Art Gallery, the NARS Foundation, Chashama, Half Gallery, and more. Groves’ work has also been included in group exhibitions at Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, LA), Yale University's Edgewood Gallery (New Haven, CT), White Page Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), Women's Studio Workshop (Rosendale, NY), and others. They've also been an artist-in-resident at Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) and the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY). Currently, Groves is completing a research and teaching fellowship as the Foundations Fellow in Arts + Sciences at Pratt Institute. In 2022, they received their MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. https://www.jacqgroves.com/
JAY PAHRE is a queer and trans settler artist, writer, and cultural worker currently based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples. His work engages trans and queer ecologies, interspecies collaboration, and place in the context of settler colonialism. The use of metal, electricity, and heat has been instrumental in his work to think through conductive and transforming ecologies. Leaning on these moments of conductivity and transformation, his work seeks to ferret out alternative formations and futures of what queer and trans ecologies of being might look like while slipping through moments of temporal, embodied, and environmental precarity.
He has attended residencies at the Western Front, Banff Centre, and Isle Royale National Park. His work has been exhibited across the US and Canada at traditional galleries and community spaces, and his writing has been published in academic journals and comic anthologies. He was selected for the 2020 Transgender Studies Chair Fellowship at the University of Victoria, as well as the Helen Belkin Memorial Scholarship (2020) and Fred Herzog Award in Visual Art (2019) at the University of British Columbia. https://www.julianpahre.com/
SAAR SHEMESH (b. 1991, New York) is an artist and educator whose creative practice uses the aesthetics of feminist abstraction and abjection to complicate bodily, spatial, and emotional binary logics through architectural interventions/ installations, sculptures, and text/ image-based studies. Through the use of materials like metal, silicone, foam, and wax that undergo a state change in order to take shape, they call upon visual references like mucosal membranes and craters to evoke visceral or destabilized feelings in viewers.
Shemesh has been an artist-in-residence at the NYPL Picture Collection (New York), Visual Arts Center (Richmond), RAIR (Philadelphia), Franconia Sculpture Park (Shafer), and SOMA (Mexico City). Most recently, their work has been exhibited at D.D.D.D. (New York), Current Space (Baltimore), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Artlot (Brooklyn), and Virginia MoCA (Virginia Beach). They hold an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. https://www.saarshemesh.com/
MARS DIETZ has an extensive career history working as a solo sound artist, club DJ, musician and sound designer in the choreographic and performing arts community in Berlin, with commissions and performances at the Spinnerei Leipzig, Sophiensaele Berlin, Haus der Kunst Munich, PopKultur Festival Berlin, Creamcake Berlin's 3hd Festival, Kunsthaus KuLe, e-werk Luckenwalde, Ballhaus Ost, as well as the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Institute for Electronic Arts, ABC No Rio, Brooklyn College, and further locations in the United States. Mars' work has been supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Musikfonds e.V., Alfred University, Creamcake Berlin, Amplify Berlin, and most recently Makerspace NYC. Mars performed as a resident DJ and collective member of BODYSNATCH, a monthly underground club night in Berlin focused on bass-forward music that sustained a dedicated cult following from 2011 - 2022. https://marsdietz.xyz/
SARAH DAVIDSON (b.1989, Canada) works primarily between drawing and painting to create compositions in which shadowy, biomorphic figures and delicate, foliated fragments mingle. Making reference to a history of discourses constructing the ‘natural’ world, their works investigate bodies, environment, observation, and the tangled strings which often bind them together. While often drawn directly from ‘nature’, their drawings diffract distinctions between embodied self and other through a queer ecological lens: critters and space collapse into one another, suggesting a permeable web. Both the eye and the mind work towards the known--animals, plants, brush marks, lines--but are caught in a space of undoing. A question floats among the forms: who’s seeing who, and how?
Davidson is originally from Canada, where they pursued their art education, at Emily Carr University (BFA, Visual Art, 2015) and the University of Guelph (MFA, Visual Art, 2019). From 2011-2021, they worked as a hiking and climbing guide, spending months of each year in remote locations in Canada, the United States and Scandinavia. In 2022, they relocated to New York. They have exhibited their work throughout Canada and the United States, including solo exhibitions at Auxier Kline, New York (2025), Shin Gallery, New York (2024), NARS Foundation, Brooklyn (2023), Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver (2022), Feuilleton, Los Angeles (2021), and Erin Stump Projects, Toronto (2019). Their work has been covered by ArtNEWS, Mousse Magazine, Canadian Art, Fukt Magazine, and more. https://sarahdavidson.ca/
NIRVANA SANTOS-KUILAN is a Brooklyn-based arts programmer and curator. She is currently the Manager of Public Programs at the Museum of Arts and Design. Previously, she has held positions at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and NARS Foundation. https://nirvanasantos.com/
Auxier Kline, New York
March 28 - April 25, 2025
The works in this exhibition combine observational drawing with biomorphic abstraction, interlacing the kind of illustration most familiar from natural history guides with bodily shapes that hover on the edge of the appealing and the grotesque. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, many of the paintings seem caught in the process of transformation; goopy oil stick melts into thinly rendered linework, and flora and fauna waver in and out of perception. Cut with a jigsaw, the edges of the panels undulate slightly, like leaves or sheets of paper.
In the large new diptych Crypsis, a central butterfly shape lurks behind spiky jimsonweed and a tangle of branch-like tubular structures. Shading on a leaf suggests both hair and muscle, and the overall impression is of macro and micro worlds enmeshed. The small new paintings, Skipper and Brushfoot, named for local butterflies, zoom in so far that their winglike patterns become abstract texture.
For the artist, an interest in ‘nature’ as a subject comes from time spent working as a wilderness guide. For 10 years, they made a living guiding expeditions for an outdoor school. ‘Nature’, they realized, has often been weaponized to delineate the bounds of heteronormative propriety, erase Indigenous nations, and otherwise police the boundaries of the dominant culture. While they often drew directly from observation in the ‘wilderness’, they became increasingly aware that this was a fraught gesture, one which begs the question: who is seeing who, and how?
During the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, they developed a series of drawings which all featured butterflies or moths (or parts of their wings), and eyes which appeared to look back at the viewer. These have since evolved into oil paintings, and the artist talks about them as a reflection of their own experience: “during the past four years, my gender identity has been in flux and my obsession with butterflies and moths (particularly the phase of their life cycles called ‘diapause’, when they transform) reflects coming to terms with my own trans non-binary identity, transitioning, and the destabilizing experience of having to rethink much of how I define and experience the world. I have a number of questions, as I develop my ongoing project: how does biomorphism relate to queerness, transness, and painting? How can elements of body horror in my work unsettle ways of looking at them? Is there such a thing as queer abstraction, or a queer art which eschews human representation?”
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SARAH DAVIDSON (b. 1989) is originally from Canada, where they pursued their art education, at Emily Carr University (BFA, Visual Art, 2015) and the University of Guelph (MFA, Visual Art, 2019). From 2011-2021, they worked as a hiking and climbing guide, spending months of each year in remote locations in Canada, the United States and Scandinavia. They relocated to New York in 2022, and currently live and work in Brooklyn. They have exhibited their work throughout Canada and the United States, including solo exhibitions at Shin Gallery, New York (2024), NARS Foundation, Brooklyn (2023), Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver (2022), Feuilleton, Los Angeles (2021), and Erin Stump Projects, Toronto (2019). Their two person booth at NADA (presented by Wil Aballe Art Projects alongside Daniel Giordano) was named one of the ‘Best Booths of NADA’ by ARTnews in 2023, and their work has been covered by Mousse Magazine, Canadian Art, Fukt Magazine, and more. Their upcoming projects include curating a group exhibition at Springs Projects, New York (opening June 2025), which considers queer and trans ecologies and includes artists from New York, Montreal, Vancouver, and Rotterdam (NL).
Crypsis, oil on panel, 96 x 63 in, 2025
Brushfoot, oil on panel, 15 x 25 in, 2025
Skipper, oil on panel, 15.5 x 24.5 in, 2025
Clearwing, oil on panel, 32 x 47 in, 2025
Loud Flower, oil on panel, 65 x 47.5 in, 2024
Transboundary butterfly, oil on panel, 30 x 47 in, 2024
NARS Foundation, Brooklyn
Oct 6 – November 1, 2023
The Gynandromorph, oil on panel, 46 x 59 in, 2023
While they often draw directly from ‘nature’, Sarah Davidson’s works diffract distinctions between embodied self and other through a queer ecological lens: critters and space collapse into one another, suggesting a permeable web. Both the eye and the mind work towards the known--animals, plants, brush marks, lines--but are caught in a space of undoing. A question floats among the forms: who’s seeing who, and how?
Fingery Eyes references a term coined by writer Eva Hayward as a means through which species perceive each other via sensuous manifesting; “a queer reading of how making sense and sensual meaning are produced through determinable and permeable species boundaries.”
In this new series of paintings and drawings, the intricate linework of scientific illustration tangles with uncanny biomorphic form. Meshes of hatching reveal glimpses into a jumble of images, and eyes peer out from within. The works weave together observational drawing and an abstract vocabulary of shapes to evoke bodies (human and otherwise) and suggest an ambiguous interiority. In the world of these images, looking and other forms of sensing disintegrate into each other, revealing something porous, strange and seductive.
The painting The Gynandromorph seems caught in the process of transformation; goopy oil stick melts into thinly rendered linework, and flora and fauna waver in and out of perception, while a central blob either emerges from or is digested by a mesh-like web of red-brown. To the upper right a plant growing through the sidewalk outside the artist's studio is rendered in delicate black; elsewhere recognizable lily pads, clover, and insects peek out from within the fray. The image reveals itself to be composed of equal parts local observation and poetic license. The edges of the panel waver slightly, like a leaf or a sheet of paper, a plein air study with a life of its own.
Sarah Davidson (they/them, b.1989, Canada) lives and works in New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2023), Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada (2022), Feuilleton, Los Angeles, CA (2021), and Erin Stump Projects, Toronto, Canada (2019). Recent group exhibitions include NADA NY, Wil Aballe Art Projects, New York, NY (2023), PASSE-PARTOUT, Luxembourg Institute for Artistic Research, New York, NY (2023), BLOOMDOOMROOM, the plumb, Toronto, Canada (2021), Deep Vision, Cassandra Cassandra, Toronto, Canada (2020), SUPER, NATURAL, Unit 17, Vancouver, Canada (2019) and many more. Their work is included in the collections of the Royal Bank of Canada and Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, Canada. They received an MFA from the University of Guelph (2019), and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2015).
Fingery Eyes references a term coined by writer Eva Hayward as a means through which species perceive each other via sensuous manifesting; “a queer reading of how making sense and sensual meaning are produced through determinable and permeable species boundaries.”
In this new series of paintings and drawings, the intricate linework of scientific illustration tangles with uncanny biomorphic form. Meshes of hatching reveal glimpses into a jumble of images, and eyes peer out from within. The works weave together observational drawing and an abstract vocabulary of shapes to evoke bodies (human and otherwise) and suggest an ambiguous interiority. In the world of these images, looking and other forms of sensing disintegrate into each other, revealing something porous, strange and seductive.
The painting The Gynandromorph seems caught in the process of transformation; goopy oil stick melts into thinly rendered linework, and flora and fauna waver in and out of perception, while a central blob either emerges from or is digested by a mesh-like web of red-brown. To the upper right a plant growing through the sidewalk outside the artist's studio is rendered in delicate black; elsewhere recognizable lily pads, clover, and insects peek out from within the fray. The image reveals itself to be composed of equal parts local observation and poetic license. The edges of the panel waver slightly, like a leaf or a sheet of paper, a plein air study with a life of its own.
Sarah Davidson (they/them, b.1989, Canada) lives and works in New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2023), Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada (2022), Feuilleton, Los Angeles, CA (2021), and Erin Stump Projects, Toronto, Canada (2019). Recent group exhibitions include NADA NY, Wil Aballe Art Projects, New York, NY (2023), PASSE-PARTOUT, Luxembourg Institute for Artistic Research, New York, NY (2023), BLOOMDOOMROOM, the plumb, Toronto, Canada (2021), Deep Vision, Cassandra Cassandra, Toronto, Canada (2020), SUPER, NATURAL, Unit 17, Vancouver, Canada (2019) and many more. Their work is included in the collections of the Royal Bank of Canada and Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, Canada. They received an MFA from the University of Guelph (2019), and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2015).
Harry, oil on panel, 6 x 8.5, 2023
Drop In, watercolour, ink, pencil crayon and pastel on paper, mounted on dibond, 53.5 x 65 in, 2022
Bent Branch, oil on panel, 35 x 46.5 in, 2023
Morpho Blue, oil on panel, 32.25 x 45 in, 2023
The Gynandromorph, oil on panel, 46 x 59 in, 2023
detail:
untitled, oil on panel, 8.5 x 12, 2023
untitled, oil on panel, 8.5 x 12, 2023
Humans Are Like Lichens, watercolour, ink, pencil crayon and pastel on paper, mounted on dibond, 53 x 65 in, 2022
Wil Aballe Art Projects,Vancouver
Jan 8 - Feb 19, 2022
Exhibition Essay by Lauren Lavery
In Swamp Sight, Davidson weaves a world of uncanny connections around the act of looking. Frog, moth, and human eyeballs all appear to regard the viewer and each other. Drawn partly from observation, these works depart from natural history illustration to swim towards a strange new form of camouflage. A question floats among the forms: who’s seeing who, and how?
Sarah Davidson (they/she, b. 1989, Ottawa) lives and works in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. They have exhibited their work at Feuilleton (Los Angeles), Cassandra Cassandra (Toronto), Erin Stump Projects (Toronto), Unit 17 (Vancouver), The Power Plant (Toronto), Little Sister (Toronto), Birch Contemporary (Toronto), The New Gallery (Calgary), and Audain Gallery (Vancouver), among others. They were a finalist in the 2018 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and are the recipient of awards and residencies including the Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant (2021), The Banff Centre’s Late Winter BAiR (2020), and AiR Sandnes residency in Sandnes, Norway (2016). They hold a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2015) and an MFA from the University of Guelph (2019).
Boundary Waters, watercolour, ink, graphite and pencil crayon on paper, 8.75 x 12 in, 2020
Thaw, watercolour, ink and pencil crayon on paper, 15.75 x 12 in, 2021
Wave, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 8.5 x 11.75 in, 2020
Amphibian Feeling, watercolour, ink, pencil crayon and pastel on paper, 43.5 x 58.5 in, 2021
Look Left, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 10 x 14 in, 2021
Blob Bulb, watercolour and pencil crayon on paper, 14 x 19 in, 2021
The Organism and its Surroundings, watercolour, ink, pencil crayon and pastel on pape, 63.5 x 47 in, 2021
Fell, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 11.75 x 17.5 in, 2021
Leaf Tender, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 7.5 x 11.5 in, 2021
Blue Drop, watercolour, ink, pencil crayon and pastel on paper, 63 x 50 in, 2021
Dizziness, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 17.5 x 12 in, 2021
Burn, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 18 x 12 in, 2021
Saccade, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 14 x 19.5 in, 2020
Mothweb, watercolour, ink, pencil crayon and pastel on paper, 37.5 x 42.5 in, 2021
With the support of:
Feuilleton, Los Angeles
Feb 1 - 27, 2021
Webbed, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 12 x 18 in, 2020
Brindled, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 20.75 x 13.75 in, 2020
Watery World, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 11.75 x 17.75 in, 2021
Moth Eye, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 12 x 9 in, 2020
One Look, watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper, 8.75 x 12 in, 2020
Feuilleton is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Canadian, Toronto-based artist Sarah Davidson.
Of this body of work, Sarah Davidson writes:
This work was all created in the past 8 months, and I was thinking of the drawings as having a relationship to plein air observational drawing, in scale and medium, and also in process. They're all drawn at least partly from observation (also partly from historical sources, partly from intuition). The background blobs and web-like forms are drawn without any reference, and the recognizable flora and fauna is rendered partly from life. The recognizable forms in my drawings are familiar (as in they’re not exotic frogs, lily pads, etc, they’re species I might actually see around). The style owes a lot to historical ‘natural’ history drawing. For instance Maria Sibylla Merian’s drawings of the life cycles of insects. Although those evoke some ambivalence in me: they’re both beautiful and also grotesque. They’re a careful and close look at delicate lives and also a symptom of the colonial exploits of a western nation.
I like for space to function strangely in my drawings. They’re meant to do something other than what that kind of scientific observational drawing does, to be porous, to suggest connections between disparate forms. There’s something queer in that, which I’m trying to work through, which is maybe inherent in the non-specific biomorphism of the forms, and the idea of stressing connections between elements rather than distinctions between them. Maybe just in wondering who defines what is ‘natural’, and who that serves.
Of this body of work, Sarah Davidson writes:
This work was all created in the past 8 months, and I was thinking of the drawings as having a relationship to plein air observational drawing, in scale and medium, and also in process. They're all drawn at least partly from observation (also partly from historical sources, partly from intuition). The background blobs and web-like forms are drawn without any reference, and the recognizable flora and fauna is rendered partly from life. The recognizable forms in my drawings are familiar (as in they’re not exotic frogs, lily pads, etc, they’re species I might actually see around). The style owes a lot to historical ‘natural’ history drawing. For instance Maria Sibylla Merian’s drawings of the life cycles of insects. Although those evoke some ambivalence in me: they’re both beautiful and also grotesque. They’re a careful and close look at delicate lives and also a symptom of the colonial exploits of a western nation.
I like for space to function strangely in my drawings. They’re meant to do something other than what that kind of scientific observational drawing does, to be porous, to suggest connections between disparate forms. There’s something queer in that, which I’m trying to work through, which is maybe inherent in the non-specific biomorphism of the forms, and the idea of stressing connections between elements rather than distinctions between them. Maybe just in wondering who defines what is ‘natural’, and who that serves.
I
spent ten years working as a guide for an outdoor school, (which I
still do, technically, I just haven't worked during the pandemic), and
my interest in thinking about 'nature' and observation comes out of
that, in my downtime I would fill notebooks with drawings from my
surroundings, and in a more abstract sense, because I had to teach
ecology and natural history classes, I started to question the subtext
of the lessons I was passing on, and my own authority on either of those
subjects. I’ve been thinking about observation for a while, and so I
made these drawings thinking it would be productively uncanny if they
looked back at their viewers. Moths in particular were interesting to
me, because their markings mimic eyes. I guess these drawings are about
wondering: who is seeing who, and how?
Sarah Davidson (b. 1989, Ottawa) lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She has exhibited her work at Cassandra Cassandra (Toronto), Erin Stump Projects (Toronto), Unit 17 (Vancouver), The Power Plant (Toronto), Little Sister (Toronto), Birch Contemporary (Toronto), The New Gallery (Calgary), and Audain Gallery (Vancouver). She was a finalist in the 2018 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and is the recipient of awards and residencies including the Banff Centre's Late Winter BAiR (2020), the Toronto Arts Council's Emerging Visual Artist Grant (2020), and AiR Sandnes residency in Sandnes, Norway (2016). She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2015) and an MFA from the University of Guelph (2019).
Sarah Davidson (b. 1989, Ottawa) lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She has exhibited her work at Cassandra Cassandra (Toronto), Erin Stump Projects (Toronto), Unit 17 (Vancouver), The Power Plant (Toronto), Little Sister (Toronto), Birch Contemporary (Toronto), The New Gallery (Calgary), and Audain Gallery (Vancouver). She was a finalist in the 2018 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and is the recipient of awards and residencies including the Banff Centre's Late Winter BAiR (2020), the Toronto Arts Council's Emerging Visual Artist Grant (2020), and AiR Sandnes residency in Sandnes, Norway (2016). She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2015) and an MFA from the University of Guelph (2019).
Erin Stump Projects, Toronto
April 26 - May 25, 2019
The Dappled World, watercolour, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper, 50 x 72 in, 2019
Plant Blindness, watercolour, ink, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper, 38 x 50 in , 2019
Feelers, watercolour, ink, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper, 27 x 35 in, 2019
Lived Along Lines, ink, watercolour, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper, 68 x 46 in, 2019
Seems Ascidian, watercolour, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper, 122 x 44 in, 2019
Web Weaver, watercolour, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper, 90 x 44 in, 2019
Lens Critters, ink, watercolour, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper, 23 x 34 in, 2019
Orb Flower, watercolour, ink, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper, 22 x 19 in, 2019
Leggy Confusion, watercolour, ink, pastel, flashe, pencil and pencil crayon on paper, 22 x 25 in, 2019
Spiderplant, watercolour, ink, pastel and pencil crayon on panel, 45 x 60 in, 2018
"Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres”
(Donna Haraway, ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’)
Who can claim to see, from a body or a place, anything besides a tangled thicket? Among trees, shifting wind and light diffract into patterns, which reveal new dimensions of moss and critter, colour and texture. In 'The Secret Life of Forms', a mesh of pigments and lines reframe the 'natural', casting light on Sarah Davidson's various references. Sinuous lines link to Hilma af Klint, Maria Sibylla Merian, or Ernst Haeckel - through a sieve of observation and projection. Weaving of this kind is not the disembodied view of a transcendentalist; the dizzying effect of roaming perspective is a spidery thought. Sticky webs fold and cling as spiders weave meanings in the changing light and the wind between branches.
Eastern tailed-blue
oil on panel
15 x 21 in
2025
Clouded Sulphur
oil on panel
15 x 21 in
2025
American Lady
15 x 21 in
oil on panel
2025
Crypsis
oil on panel
96 x 63 in
2025
details:
Clearwing
oil on panel
32 x 47 in
2025
details:
Transboundary butterfly
oil on panel
30 x 47 in
2024
details:
Supra-organism
oil on panel
46.5 x 66 in
2024
details:
Loud Floweroil on panel
65 x 47.5 in
2024
detail:
Nocturne
oil on panel
57.5 x 46.5 in
2023
details:
The Gynandromorph
oil on panel
46 x 59 in
2023
details:
The Snuffler
oil on panel
31.5 x 47 in
2023
details:
Bent Branch
oil on panel
35 x 46.5 in
2023
Morpho Blue
oil on panel
32.25 x 45 in
2023
details:
Drop In
watercolour, ink, pencil crayon and pastel on paper
53.5 x 65 in
2022
Vanishing Present
watercolour, ink and pencil crayon on paper
12 x 9 in
2022
Humans Are Like Lichens
watercolour, ink, pencil crayon and pastel on paper
53 x 65 in
2022
Swamp Walk
acrylic on panel
8 x 11 feet
2022
installed at Evergreen Brickworks, Toronto
This mural ‘Swamp Walk’ by Toronto-based artist Sarah Davidson weaves together timeless and familiar features of the Brick Works’s local ecosystem and ecology. Here, the milk snake meanders under the wing of a swallowtail butterfly as the eyes of the grey tree frog observe the snapping turtle—all while remaining somewhat obscured in their tangled web of natural forms. Their interconnectedness makes a vital and complex reference to nature’s intricate network and prompts the question: who’s seeing who, and how?
Davidson works primarily between drawing and painting, and often borrows directly from nature through a queer ecological lens.
‘Swamp Walk’ is a collaboration between Evergreen’s Outdoor Education and Public Art programs.
photos: Ibrahim Abusitta
Watery World
watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper
11.75 x 17.75 in
2021
Amphibian Feeling
watercolour, ink, pencil crayon and pastel on paper
43.5 x 58.5 in
2021
Leaf Tender
watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper
7.5 x 11.5 in
2021
Fell
watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper
11.75 x 17.5 in
2021
Dizziness
watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper
17.5 x 12 in
2021
Wolfworm
watercolour, ink, pencil crayon, gouache, pencil and pastel on paper
33 x 49 in
2020
detail:
Looking Through
watercolour, ink, pencil crayon, gouache, pencil and pastel on paper
34.5 x 49 in
2020
both sides:
Trickledown
watercolour, ink, pencil crayon, gouache, pencil and pastel on paper
33 x 49 in
2020
detail:
Nature as Event
watercolour, pencil crayon, pencil and pastel on paper
34.5 x 40 in
2020
Frog Eyes
pencil and watercolour on paper
37 x 50 in
2020
detail:
Lived Along Lines
ink, watercolour, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper
68 x 46 in
2019
details:
Lens Critters
ink, watercolour, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper
23 x 34 in
2019
Plant Blindness
watercolour, ink, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper
38 x 50 in
2019
details:
The Dappled World
watercolour, pastel, pencil and pencil crayon on paper
50 x 72 in
2019
Leggy Confusion
watercolour, ink, pastel, flashe, pencil and pencil crayon on paper
22 x 25 in
2019
The Life of Forms
Watercolour, ink, pastel and pencil crayon on Arches hotpress paper
50 x 75 in
2018
details:
Subterranean Marks
watercolour, ink, pastel, pencil crayon and pencil on paper
dimensions variable
2018
details:
installation:
Cherries for Hilma
Watercolour, ink, pastel, pencil crayon and pencil on paper
47 x 33 in
2018
details:
Spiderplant
watercolour, ink, pastel and pencil crayon on panel
45 x 60 in
2018
details:
hide and seek
ink, watercolour, flashe, graphite, pencil crayon on paper
46 x 51 in
2018
the garden at night
watercolour, ink, flashe, and pencil crayon on paper
50 x 75 in
2017
details:
install:
the secret life of plants
ink, watercolour, flashe, graphite, pencil crayon on paper
37.5 x 69 in
2017
details:
wonderland
ink, watercolour, pencil crayon, and oil pastel on paper
50 x 55 in
2017
details:
scrap your body
ink, watercolour, oil stick, flashe and graphite on paper
41 x 48 in
2017
detail:
blue marbled
ink, watercolour, flashe, oil, pencil crayon, oil pastel, chalk and graphite on paper
43 x 54 in
2017
details:
tentacular thinking
ink, watercolour, oil stick, flashe and graphite on paper
50 x 37 in
2016
detail:
The Menace
ink, watercolour and graphite on paper
56 x 43 in
2016
Red Colour
ink, watercolour, pencil, silkscreen, collage, Arches hot press paper, foamcore
28 x 36 in
2016
detail:
Blue Colour
ink, watercolour, pencil, silkscreen, collage, Arches hot press paper, foamcore
28 x 36 in
2016
detail:
Yellow Colour
ink, watercolour, pencil, silkscreen, collage, Arches hot press paper, foamcore
28 x 36 in
2016
detail:
Diapause
Available for purchase through Art Metropole
Sarah:
This book is a collection of most of the small drawings I made between June 2020 and December 2021. They are a response to a specific set of circumstances. Namely: I was stuck in Tkaronto/Toronto in the midst of a pandemic, and felt a deep urge to find wilder spaces. So, I was going on long walks through every park I could get to on foot, and drawing from observation. I was too depressed for a lot of that time to finish anything on a more ambitious scale, and the small ‘plein air’ scale was one solution. These drawings reference a particular kind of natural history illustration, and I hope that they are a bit uncanny. I have lots of questions, like: who decides what is ‘natural’, and who does that serve? How could the world be shown to be more connected, strange and sensuous? Who’s looking at who, and how? Emily Moriarty and I had collaborated before on a project that explored our relationship to ‘nature’, and since we spent sometimes several hours a week wandering around urban ravines, it made sense to me to ask them to write a text in response to the drawings.
Our mutual friend Brennan Kelly designed this book, and also integrated related reference materials and studio ephemera (cellphone photos, marginalia doodles) into the collages that link everything together.
Emily:
The two poems, Exoskeleton and Rainfall were created using search engines and appropriating text from various websites ranging from animal facts for children to scientific papers. Looking through Sarah’s work, I would pinpoint images such as eyes, snakes, roots, and flowers, to name a few, and search them in Google. The resulting poems are formed by chance and chaos, touchstones of nature.
———
Full colour digital print, perfect bound, 82 pages, 8.875 × 11.75 in
First printing (2022), edition of 100.
Sarah Davidson (they/them, b. 1989, Canada/Kanata) has exhibited across Canada and the USA. While they often draw directly from ‘nature’, their works diffract distinctions between embodied self and other through a queer ecological lens. A question floats among the forms: who’s seeing who, and how?
Emily Moriarty (she/they, b. 1992, Canada/Kanata) is a mixed race Indo-Canadian artist working in performance, sculpture, and photography. Her practice maneuvers through expressions of empathy and care, human/plant relationships, and action vs. inaction. Chance and fortuity dictate their art-making and dalliance into poetry.
Brennan Kelly (he/him, b. 1982) is an artist, graphic designer, and educator based in Toronto/Tkaronto.
———
for the trees
for the trees
Drawings—Sarah Davidson
Book Design—Erica Wilk
you can’t see the forest
Essay—Brynn McNab
Risograph printed & published by Moniker Press
Perfect bound with fabric book tape binding.
52 pages—Edition of 150
Vancouver, BC—2017